MathWorks is creating a deck of playing cards that will be offered as gifts at our trade show booths. The design of the cards is based on Penrose Tilings and plots of the Finite Fourier Transform Matrix.... read more >>

I am addicted. I keep coming back to John Conway's Game of Life. Years ago, I wrote a chapter about Life in Experiments with MATLAB. I wrote a three-part series about Life shortly after I started blogging. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. I have recently made significant enhancements to my MATLAB program for Life. I never seem to finish the code because I get diverted by actually using the program to explore the Universe. I invite you to join me. But, fair warning, you might become addicted too.... read more >>

Find the optimum traveling salesman tour through the capitals of the 48 contiguous states in the USA.... read more >>

Create a MATLAB® graph object from information about neighbors among the 48 contiguous states in the USA.... read more >>

I probably first saw this matrix in 1960 in John Todd's class at Caltech. But I forgot about it until Tahar Loulou jogged my memory with a comment following my blog post in late May. It deserves a place in our gallery of interesting matrices.... read more >>

David Wilson, from the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, has alerted me to this remarkable coincidence. Here is the "Burning Ship" from my post about fractals four weeks ago.... read more >>

Camille Jordan (1838-1922)... read more >>

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, SIGPLAN, expects to hold the fourth in a series of conferences on the History of Programming Languages in 2020, see HOPL-IV. The first drafts of papers are to be submitted by August 2018. That long lead time gives me the opportunity to write a detailed history of MATLAB. I plan to write the paper in sections, which I'll post in this blog as they are available. This is the seventh, and final, installment.... read more >>

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, SIGPLAN, expects to hold the fourth in a series of conferences on the History of Programming Languages in 2020, see HOPL-IV. The first drafts of papers are to be submitted by August 2018. That long lead time gives me the opportunity to write a detailed history of MATLAB. I plan to write the paper in sections, which I'll post in this blog as they are available.... read more >>

Today is Friday, the 13th. In many parts of the world, today is regarded as unlucky. But I want to revisit an old question: is today unlikely? What are the chances that the 13th of any month falls on a Friday? Computing the answer makes use of a new MATLAB® feature, the datetime method.... read more >>